What Will You Choose for Your 2,000?

The other days, a friend of mine acquired a copy of the recent HBO version of Cormac McCarthy's play, The Sunset Limited. Very good. Tommy Lee Jones played White brilliantly, and Samuel L. Jackson was fantastic as Black. At one point, the two men are (surprise) having a conversation. Ok, so they're having a conversation for 90 minutes. At one point in that 90 minutes, Jackson asks Jones how many books he's read. Jones plays a professor, and he realistically says something like (I'm paraphrasing here): "Oh, I don't know. 2 books a week. 100 a year. For 40 years. 4,000."

4,000 books. That seems like a lot, but when put into perspective, 40 years is a long time. Now, this got me thinking about my own reading. I don't read 2 books a week, or at least I won't when I'm no longer a graduate student. There just won't be time.

So let's do some math. Prepare yourselves. If I read just one book a week for the next 40 years, that's about 2,000 books. That will take me to my mid-60s. After that, I may not even be able to see anymore, so maybe 2,000 books is it (or, like the few times I've seen my grandparents "reading," I'll sleep through a few more after that). So what are my 2,000 books going to be?

This is a lot of pressure. For every book I choose, another won't be read. I've operated for a long time under the delusion that, eventually, I would be able to read all the books I've ever wanted to read. Now I know that's not true, even if tomorrow people stopped writing books.

In a moment of panic, I thought, "Wait a second. I'll just look at that list '1001 Books to Read Before you Die.'" Then I thought, "Heck no!" I'm not letting some pretentious list-maker determine how I spend the next 20 years of my reading life.

I have no solutions. Only depression. I'm no longer making goals like: "Read the complete works of Faulkner" or "Read more Dickens." I want to read all of Faulkner (maybe not Dickens), but can I justify that kind of bite into my 2,000?

This is troubling. So troubling, in fact, that I spaced out during the pivotal hour-mark of The Sunset Limited. Which means I'll have to re-watch it. Maybe that bumps my number down to 1,999.

Best of 2010

What's that you say? I'm a week or so late? Well, I actually thought about my "best of" picks. Also, unlike most reviewers, I actually waited until the end of 2010 to reflect on the year. Starting before January 1 devalues the end of the year. If you publish a "best of" list before that and experience something phenomenal, your "best of" life is a lie. I just don't want to lie to people. That was a lot of ado. Here are my picks:

Best Fiction I Read in 2010
1. The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu
2. Democracy by Joan Didion
3. The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall

My reviews of all these books are available on my goodreads page (accessible by clicking on the goodreads widget on the right), so I won't go into too much detail here. I'll just say that Mengestu blew me away, Didion changed the way I think about storytelling, and Udall made fresh and new a subject I thought untouchable and uninteresting.

Best Nonfiction I Read in 2010
1. The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X and Alex Haley
2. Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela
3. Massacre at Mountain Meadows by Ronald Walker

I'm naming my first-born son Malcolm. That's how much I admire this man. If the Simpsons hadn't ruined the name Nelson for me, I might consider naming my second son after Mandela. It was a long and tiring book, but Mandela taught me a lot about leadership, patience, and charity. Walker's historical research reaffirmed my faith in Mormon history after a year of reading subpar and poorly researched rubbish.

Best Reading Surprise of 2010
-The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu
This was (maybe) the last book I read this year. I was expecting the usual self-consciousness and affected lyricism of most "up and coming" authors. Mengestu's writing, though, was organic, beautiful, and understated. The story was real without being heavy-handed. I love this book.

Best Guilty Pleasure Read 0f 2010
1. Night Soldiers by Alan Furst
2. World War Z by Max Brooks

I'm not even guilty about either of these. Brooks made zombies more alive [rimshot!] on the printed page than they are in most films. And Furst is a master of spy fiction that I've only recently discovered. Not everything I've read by him this year has satisfied me, and I blame that mostly on the fact that I read Night Soldiers first.

Best Movie Theater Experience of 2010
1. Inception
2. I need to go to the theater more....

It's been a long time since I've spent 3 hours in a theater and felt like a half hour has gone by. Inception might not be the best movie of the year, but I don't see enough movies in theaters to make this a very deep category.

Best Movie Rental Experience of 2010
1. Un Prophete dir. Jacques Audiard
2. Mystic River dir. Clint Eastwood
3. Blood Simple dir. Coen bros.

A Prophet is one of the best movies I've seen in a while. While I don't recommend it for most, it retold the prison story in a world of prison movies set on remaking The Shawshank Redemption. Casey Affleck blew me away in Mystic River and I loved watching part of the genesis of the Coens' genius.

Best TV Series I Watched in 2010
1. The Walking Dead (AMC)
2. The West Wing (NBC)
3. MI-5 (BBC)
4. Mad Men (AMC)

This category is so magnificently deep! But I always reward innovation, and The Walking Dead expanded the idea of a TV series. My wife and I have been watching the West Wing on DVD, and last year we finished the first two seasons. Best casting and dialogue. Whatever happened to good, witty shows like that? MI-5 is what 24 wanted to be but couldn't with an American audience. Fast, dark, understated, and troubling. I love me some spies. And Mad Men season 4...keeping on strong into the mid-1960s. I have the sneaking suspicion that I love this show the same way I used to love soap operas. But I reassure myself by remembering that my tastes have matured....

Correction 2/2011: So, it looks like I mixed up Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone. Both based on Lehane novels, if that's any saving grace. I still stick with Mystic River as my number two. Affleck was good in Gone, but so were Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, and (though I hate to admit it) Kevin Bacon. Trifecta. Bam.

Racial Sins

Sources: Taken (dir. Pierre Morel), Gunfighter Nation by Richard Slotkin, The Searchers (dir. John Ford), and many more

I got my wife Taken for Christmas. It was one of those "I'm buying this 'cause you like it but I also like it (maybe more) and so everybody wins" gifts. Not to worry, though, since I also got her an oversized bathrobe and a pearl necklace whose price means it was either stolen or a fake. I have no selfish interest in either of those things.

But back to Taken.

                                                                               photo from here

This movie bothers me, though I seem unable to stop watching it. It's action-packed, and it's fun (?) to watch a father go on a rampage unencumbered by moral compunction. But that's not what troubles me. In fact, the level of violence is comparable to what I would want to be able to inflict on bad guys who were trying to sell my daughter into sex slavery. What does bother me is the casting.


Taken employs a troubling method of casting which I'll call the sin sandwich. On the bottom layer, you have your thugs. On the middle layer (where all the good stuff necessary for a fulfilling bourgeois life is--money, family, glitz, glamor) you have the greedy middle-men who facilitate crime in return for staggering stipends. On the top you have the mega-bosses--animals who cause the criminal world's wheels to turn.

A reasonable cross-section of the underworld, you say? Perhaps. But I can't help but be bothered by the racial make-up of each class. Brown-skinned people (from the "bad parts" of Eastern Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa) make up the top and bottom layers (the bread) while Western Europeans and Americans are in the middle. In other words, the Nordic-Teutonic-Anglo peoples are the meat that holds everything together and makes crime so darn tasty.

Now, perhaps this is simply a reflection of true life. Perhaps most greed-induced crime occurs under the pink-skinned guidance of WASP progeny. But I doubt it. More troubling than the unreality of this depiction, though, is what the sin sandwich paradigm says about Hollywood's (and therefore our) continued racialist notions. I don't want to spend too much time talking about the scum and the mega-bosses. I think white folks' projections of evil onto the brown-skinned others of the world is a subject that most people understand, and those who don't understand it at this point likely never will. But the white racial sin of greed, especially in its middle position on the sin sandwich, tells me a lot about how white people still see themselves as behaviorally distinct from others.

The tacit thesis I'm seeing in Taken is that white people have racial predisposition towards greed. Greed is our racial sin. White people love money so much that they will allow the evil brown people to come, take a few of our white virgins (a nod here to Dr. Slotkin), and maintain our way of life from the dirty money we receive in return. If that sounds just as bad as what the violent thugs or the inhuman mega-bosses are doing, think again. Because this racial sin of greed, while still despicable, is a character flaw--something one catches at boarding school because one never gets enough letters from home during the holidays--while the gritty violence of the thugs and the barbarian tastes of the mega-bosses are depicted as cultural, national, or even biological degeneracies. In other words, the audience of Taken is left with the impression that those few white men have done bad things while the Albanians, Arabs, and Africans are bad human beings.

There are many supporting factors that reinforce this message: a French middleman who loves his family, the white protagonist who eschews violence to be closer to his daughter, the white friend who dies from the drugs  before prostitution can ever begin. All these factors reinforce the complexity of the white race while contrasting that complexity with the monolithic badness of gun-toting Muslims.

Now, Taken is not the only film that reinforces such racialist ideas. I've noted The Searchers above in the Sources section, but that's not as clear or recent of an example (though for evidence's sake, here's the schema: Comanche braves as the thugs, greedy would-be assassins/facilitators as the middlemen, tribal chiefs intent on sucking the whiteness out of little girls as the mega-bosses). Numerous films, television shows, and even news reporting participate as well. And I'm not really sure what the next step is here except to say that assigning a sin (or any other characteristic) based on skin color risks reifying the latent racism that we've been working so hard for so long to remove. There's no reason to boycott or not watch a film like Taken, but let's make sure we think while we watch.

Whiney Limeys

This looks serious doesn't it?

The British Parliament is being invaded. Thousands of protesters pushing past police cordons to get to the House of Commons and teach those MPs a lesson.

We turned on CNN this morning to these scenes. There were even cavalry charges at the protesters. Very thrilling. Emblazoned across the bottom of the screen was the headline "Students protest parliament vote to triple tuition!" Incredible, we thought! Can you image NYU's tuition being tripled? No one without a trust fund could attend. It would be criminal to restrict education to that elite few!

The CNN anchor seemed to be having similar thoughts. Hoping to wow her viewers with astronomical tuition numbers, she asked the correspondent on-scene (who was simultaneously trying to keep his cameraman from being trampled by men and beasts) how much triple tuition would be.

His response?

"Parliament will be voting to place a cap of 9000 pounds on tuition...that's about $15,000."

$15,000? I almost peed my pants with jealousy. Oxford, Cambridge...Leeds. For $15,000 a year? And British students are injuring police officers and shooting fireworks at police horses over this? Give me a break. Take one fewer holiday to the Mediterranean and get a summer job at Tesco, for crying out loud.

Why WikiLeaks May Kill Us All

Sources: World War Z by Max Brooks, The Walking Dead on AMC, and the Wikileaks news coverage, especially this NY Times article

Ever since I started watching The Walking Dead on AMC (so, since Halloween), I've been a little bit jumpy. You assume zombies will always warn you with a barely stifled moan of undead craving, but that never seems to be the case. Instead, zombies have a terrifying penchant for silent stalking and surprise snacking.

My jumpiness only increased with my recent devouring of Max Brooks' World War Z. I remember picking this one up off a Barnes and Nobles bookshelf about a year ago and getting completely absorbed in a random woman's story. Fast-forward a year later, and you'll find me feverishly needing more zombie (how's that for a role reversal?) after another oh-so-short 45-minute episode of The Walking Dead comes to an end. I found Brooks' book at the library and, in between Thanksgiving naps, had my first experience with the genre of zombie literature. Actually, I'm not sure if there is a genre, or more than this book about zombies, but I'm hooked. Now if only my two guilty pleasures, spy thrillers and zombie war history, could somehow be combined...

Anyway, that's just a long way of saying World War Z made a zombie invasion so realistic that for the past week I've been extra vigilant during my dark walks home. I walk through the darker corners of BYU campus ready to drop my satchel at a moment's notice and head for the nearest grocery/firearms store. Or the nearest LONG blunt object. Yesterday, though, I made it all the way home without once sniffing the air for any hint of rotten flesh. And while I can't help but think this threat-level detente is exactly what a zombie overlord would want to happen, it's human nature to relax once a threat overload has passed.

Which brings me to my beef with WikiLeaks, a beef informed almost exclusively by my poker skills. WikiLeaks can't bluff for anything. The threat of a "vast network of untapped resources" (not really a quote) and unleaked material they're using in a desperate attempt to leverage themselves out from everyone's bad side has about as much credibility as Mark Sanchez saying he's got something up his sleeve for the next time he plays the Patriots.

WikiLeaks went all in before anyone else knew there was a game going on. No one raised, no one matched, and half of the countries didn't even look at their cards. You can probably think of several other metaphors for what's happened in the past weeks, so let your imagination run wild.

That being said, I love the idea of what Assange and his cronies tried to do. While I understand the appropriateness of some secrets in diplomacy, I love the idea of leaders having to act as if anything they said or did could be leaked the next day for the world to see. But that's a huge amount of power. That's on par with the jealous Lord of Hosts (or the all-seeing eye of Sauron). And where the Lord of Hosts is still working, and Sauron lasted an epoch or two, WikiLeaks lasted a few weeks.

If they had leaked key cables with precision and delicacy, states would have stood up, taken notice, and followed the same pattern of aggressive damage-control that they're following now. The difference, however, would be that instead of placing their salvation on the threat of publishing a very non-threatening "mass of State Dept. cables" that probably say something like "Secretary Clinton registered a complaint about the lack of pumpernickel rolls at Foggy Bottom," they would have concrete tools with which they could continue fighting.

Instead, WikiLeaks has cried "Wolf!" It's a big wolf, and it was there, but after a week, we're going to feel safe again. We're not going to lose sleep because someone said nasty things about someone else or because a Saudi informant or Iranian professor was exposed and summarily executed. That's too far away. We're too callous. So the next time WikiLeaks unloads a huge package of sensitive memos, we're going to think, "Meh. I've already felt those feelings. I'm going to watch more Jersey Shore." And if in that box of sensitive memos there's a special cable delineating a possible zombie outbreak in central China, and if we ignore it because WikiLeaks jaded us too soon, I'm going to be royally pissed.

 

from AMC's The Walking Dead site.

The End (or Temporary Pause) of Empathy

Sources: The Empathic Civilization by Jeremy Rifkin and the World Cup

In Jeremy Rifkin's latest book, he makes a case for a more flexible understanding of human nature. In brief, humans have developed in accordance with their opportunities for empathic development (putting themselves in other people's shoes or lack thereof). The more opportunities, via improved roads, availability of foodstuffs, or the internet, the more empathic the civilization becomes, and the greater opportunity for healthy civilization. Admittedly, this is only part of Rifkin's thesis, and perhaps not even the most groundbreaking, but for me it was the most important. For about 24 hours after finishing the book, I was convinced.

Then I started watching the World Cup.

I'll save the bulk of my World Cup reflections until next week, but I've become decidedly less empathic as the tournament has progressed. I've had problems like this before. Brief but impassioned moments of hatred for South Korea accompanied the short track competitions in this year's Olympics. But that's nothing in comparison with the merry-go-round of nationalism/irrational hatred/Machiavellian politics that churn inside me during each soccer match.

The list of countries I've hated with belligerence in the past month:

Uruguay (because they flopped against South Africa, handballed against Ghana, and provided a safe haven for Nazi war criminals)
Mexico (because they beat South Africa and I covet Dos Santos' hair)
France (residual anger from Zidane's headbutt four years ago and Henry's handball against the Irish in qualifying)
Argentina (residual anger from the mano de Dios incident I didn't (couldn't) even witness in person)
the U.S. (shoddy play and early goals allowed)
England (Revolutionary War bitterness...well, more the War of 1812. Plus, I don't like Rooney's look.)
Slovenia (well, really Mali, but I grouped the ref and "his" team together)
Portugal (Ronaldo, bleh)
North Korea (torpedoes)
Germany, Australia, Serbia, Ghana, Netherlands, Paraguay, New Zealand, Italy, Slovakia, and Brazil.

It's as if all my real world worries, imaginary slights, and competitive anguish meshed together into a ball of ugliness that raised my blood pressure to unhealthy levels. Add to that the number of meals I ended up eating out because I was "busy" following the tournament, and the World Cup may have taken a few good years off my life.

Strike Three

I know some folks have requested that I find a new line of blogging (i.e. talk about something besides race problems in Arizona), but this story really should be broadcast. The Huffington Post reports that a mural depicting children (actual students who attend the school) of different ethnicities is going to be repainted (under direct orders from the school authorities) because of constant community drive-by slurs, often while the children themselves were helping professional artists with the mural. And by repainted, I mean painted white. Here's the story.

So let me recap. Because members of the community shouted "nigger" and "spic" as they drove by, the rational decision by the school is to whiten the black and chicano students' faces. Brilliant. That's the exact right decison...for a sniveling coward living in fear of a resurgent racist movement akin to the KKK.

Once again, I fear we forget our history. How long did we, as a nation, help Jim Crow persist because we deluded ourselves into thinking that patience with racial slurs and racist actions would help it go away? "I'm sure the police will wake up soon and treat people decently." Wrong. Caving to pressure like this, deciding to whiten the faces of students of color, will only prolong racist sentiment.

What's worse though, the more patience we have with racism, the more opportunity it has to poison the national consciousness as a whole. Slaveowners in the antebellum South had to create an entire narrative that allowed them to deal with the cognitive dissonance involved in a situation where Christians "masters" abused other human beings to make money. The resulting narrative? Black people are inferior. It helped massa sleep at night. This disgusting idea was allowed to persist in the South, and the result was a poisoning, not only of the minds of each subsequent southern generation, but of generations throughout the United States. 150 years after the abolition of slavery, that idea persists. This is the longevity of racist thought left unchecked. It will NOT go away quietly. Official silence will NOT give racists an opportunity to cool down. And most importantly, giving into to racists demands will NOT bring peace to the community. Quite the opposite. Ask Neville Chamberlain.

Let's not delude ourselves into thinking that either 1. This is a problem only in Arizona or 2. All Arizonans are racists. But as bloggers throughout the sphere have commented, it appears as though President Obama's elections has unleashed the darkest tide of racial violence (psychological, verbal, and physical) in years. To paraphrase the Bible, Jesus Christ once overheard some less-than-upstanding folks discussing their ancestors. They said, "If we were alive when the ancient prophets taught, we would not have stoned them like our ancestors did." We know how that worked out, and Christ certainly called their bluff. Likewise, how many of us have thought: "If I lived in the 60s, I wouldn't have been racist. I would have helped in the civil rights movement. I would have been at the March in Washington."? I know I have. My friends, we now have an opportunity to prove we're not the kind of hypocrites we so easily excoriate in biblical contexts. Speak out. Speak out everywhere, but especially where you are. Make racial epithets and actions unacceptable in your presence. Fight to make sure racially-motivated laws are not passed or enforced in your community. If you do nothing, you're just like the Arizonan authorities who, through their action (or lack thereof) said loud and clear: "It's ok to call our children niggers."